# One primary shards are "lost" permanently when updating data

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/one-primary-shards-are-lost-permanently-when-updating-data/21178>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [December 10, 2014, 5:10am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/one-primary-shards-are-lost-permanently-when-updating-data/21178 "2014-12-10T05:10:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Jingzhao\_Ou](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/eada6e/32.png) [@Jingzhao\_Ou](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Jingzhao_Ou)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2014, 5:10am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/one-primary-shards-are-lost-permanently-when-updating-data/21178/1 "2014-12-10T05:10:20Z")

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Hi, all,

I have an urgent case and appreciate any help. I have an index with 5  
shards, no replica, and running fine on a single AWS EC2 c3.large box for  
months.I now need to update around 1 million data entries in this index. I  
use the bulk operations to do the update on 50K batches. After about 300K  
updates, my bulk operation started to time out and failed. I then checked  
the index status and got

"\_shards" : {  
"total" : 5,  
"successful" : 4,  
"failed" : 0  
},

One shard is lost permanently. I could still query for data. But when I did  
any index operations afterwards, it timed out every few tries. The only way  
to fix this is to wipe out the whole index and restore it from snapshots. I  
tested Elasticsearch 1.3.5 and 1.4.1, both have this symptom. I tried  
pausing for 10 seconds between each bulk updates, setting refresh\_rate to  
-1. None of them helps.

Strangely, I ran the same operation on my Windows 8 machine and things  
worked just fine there. Not sure why it failed so badly on AWS. My data is  
stored on a 100G EBS. Can anyone give me some help? I really worry about  
the data lost at this time.

Thanks a lot!  
Jingzhao

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 12:44am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/one-primary-shards-are-lost-permanently-when-updating-data/21178/2 "2017-07-06T00:44:35Z")

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